Re: Existential risks

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:

I don't have as much faith as Tim seems to in the idea of AI becoming
the dominate life form any time soon. I see no motivation for a smart
robot to want to reproduce, or to build other robots that want to
reproduce.

There is no motivation for cell phones to reproduce - but nonetheless
there seem to have been an awful lot of them made recently.

Memetically speaking, the cellphone blueprints evolve, and
cell phones are part of their phenotype. AIs and robots
will probably be like that.

Yes, I agree completely. There will be a lot of AIs of all different
shapes and sizes, and they will build other AIs, but only as long as their
actions, and their existence, serves us. The energy and raw material they
consume in their actions will be weighed against our needs.

Why would man want to build robots that would want to steal resources
away from us by motivating them to want to survive and reproduce? It's
as stupid an idea as trying to build a machine to dril for oil and burn
it up when it found it. What on earth would motivate us to build
machines to consume our energy and raw material without producing
something we wanted as a side effect?

Machines compete with humans for resources whether we like it or not -
their ecological niche overlaps with our own. Why then do we build
them? Because of the things they let us do.

Right, because when a machine, like a car, consumes a gallon of gas, or a
ton of metal, it's because we have approved that use by buying the car and
buying the gas. Our money and our actions is our vote of approval for
those resources to be used in that way.

A self reproducing AI which was motivated to try and survive and reproduce,
would not be allowed to exist. Why would I buy a robot built for self
survival and then send it off into the world to reproduce and consume
resources and compete with me when I could just as easy vote for a better
option?

Any AI which doesn't continue to serve man's needs, will be seen as a
threat and eliminated. No sane person will build a machine that will
kill them, and a self reproducing resource stealing AI will kill us.
The sane people of the world will do whatever it takes to protect
themselves from the insane people who build such machines and from the
accidents that might happen where something thought to be good turns
bad.

I don't think AIs will kill us. At least that is not very likely.
More like, in a machine-dominated economy, many unmodified humans
will find it difficult to compete - which means that they will be
forced away from the centres of industry, to where land is cheap.

There will be rebels against this state of affairs - but they will
be rebels against the rest of civilisation.

Well, I think this all depends on how humans, and society end up evolving
which is extremely hard to predict. We don't need to modify ourselves to
make ourselves more powerful. Our control over our environment is what
makes us powerful. We don't need a bionic arm to do that. We just need a
hammer. We don't need a bionic eye, when we can just easy easily use a
pair of binoculars or a microscope. We don't need to run faster or longer,
when we can just drive a car. We don't need a bigger brain if we can get
computers and AIs to do the thinking for us. We don't need to make hammers
when we can get someone (or something) else to do it for us. As long as we
remain in control of our environment, there is little point in modifying
ourselves. Modifications are more important to fix damage, and to make
ourselves more popular with other humans who we have to live and complete
with.

If we could replace our arms with better arms, we probably would. But a
human arm is a hard thing to improve on. We aren't very close to being
able to do that yet. Our robotic arms don't have the same level of
control, or sensors, or energy efficiencies, or the ability to self-heal,
or the ability to run off of energy delivered by blood. We sill have a lot
of work to do before we can figure out how to build better arms. For now,
what's far easier and better is to build special purpose changeable
additions (like hammers and screw drivers and shovels) which we can add to
the end of the arm to make it better.

AI brain implants which improve our memory and learning skills however
could be important. However, I suspect what is more likely is that we will
just use an increasing array of external AI assistants such as personal
intelligent assistants to help us remember and do the things we want to do
- and a world full of AI researchers to answer questions for us - just like
Goggle answers some questions for us, or a GPS answers the question of
where are we.

I could agree to an argument that it's inevitable that life forms very
different from man may inherit the earth at some distant point in the
future. But it's hard for me to accept the idea that it will happen
any time soon.

One point of the accelerating change observations is that the long
term arrives sooner than you might think.

Yeah, when I first wrote the above, I wrote something like two thousand
years, but changed it to "not soon" for that very reason. What seems like
it should take 2 thousand years today might only take 200 years because of
exponential growth curve. Predicting time is even harder than predicting
what will happen.

Strong AI I believe will happen soon, but man won't be replaced
any time soon. Who knows how we will evolve with the help of
advancements in technology and genetics, but whatever we evolove into
is what will most likely inherit the earth.

Humans are a crummy starting point for any future development -
so our descendants will most likely be more closely related to
today's machines than they are to us.

Well, really, you can look at DNA as the starting point, and humans are
just AI machines created by the DNA to help it survive. In turn we will
create other AI machines to continue that process of keeping the DNA alive.
The DNA is in control here, not us.

Unless something happens and the DNA fails to survive, our decedents will
continue to look just like they have for billions of years now - societies
of DNA strands surrounded by huge industrial complexes they built which
help keep them alive. Our work at creating AI is just adding to that, it's
not changing anything - the DNA is still in control.

We are many orders of magnitude smarter than our DNA, but yet, here we are,
using our super intelligence to keep _it_ alive. If DNA could create super
intelilgence and make it continue to survive the purpose of keeping the DNA
alive, what makes you think the super intelligence we create will do
anything other than continue to serve that same purpose?

Building on the human foundation is a ridiculous plan.

Yes, but it's not _our_ choice. We have no more choice than the AIs we
will build will have a choice on how they are motivated. We are here only
because the DNA lets us be here (so to say). We will survive only as long
as the DNA considers us worthy of taking care of them. They have built us
in a way to make it against our very nature to do anything other than keep
the DNA alive. We will build other AIs in the same way - to make it
against their very nature to do anything else than keep the DNA alive. The
forces of evolution are at work to make sure it stays that way.

Only if a life form more powerful than DNA based life emerges will the DNA
be evolved out of existence. DNA based life is "smart enough" to know not
to create things that will kill it, and DNA based life has all of human
society working to keep it alive. Even though we will reach a point in
time where we will know enough to build self reproducing smart machines
that could take over, we will never let them - we will never build machines
that will want to take over because it's against our innate desires which
motivate us to keep the DNA alive.

All the technology we create, including AI technology, just creates a
larger protective shell around the DNA.

Augmenting humans would just wind up with their brains
being replaced by computers, and their bodies by robots -
not a significantly different result from a straight
machine takeover.

It's the same result. The DNA will fight to keep itself alive and not be
replaced. It does it with the help of evolution. The DNA based life forms
that don't do what is needed to keep the DNA alive will die and the ones
which do, will be the ones that shape how the future DNA life forms will
act.

Uploads may preserve some human minds, but you need an
extremely advanced AI to make that possible, and then,
the motivation to upload old personalities becomes pretty
weak. How many people play with Commodore PET emulators
these days - not many. Human minds will be even more
archaic and useless, by the time they can be uploaded.

These issues are just so hard to predict. I think you are right that by
the time we could upload a mind, we will have already figured out how to
build far more intelligent machines and the world will be full of
intelligent machines of all shapes and sizes and levels of intelligence.
By that point in time, a single human mind won't be very important to
preserve. It would be nice to preserve an Einstein or Bach, but that's
because they brains that did something most other brains could not do. But
by the time we could do that, all the great minds of our times will be
machines, not humans. So by the time we can do it, society probably won't
see it as something we should do.

Then there's the complexity that no one likes to lose a close friend or
loved one. And as such, there is motivation to try and keep them alive.
But by the time we can upload a mind, everyone will understand that it's
just the "software" we are saving by doing the upload. AI's will be using
uploading for a very long time before humans can make use of it.

How will people feel about having a copy of the software built into a
machine before they die just because their friends can still feel like some
part of the person is still there? It's not like _they_ were being saved.

Right now, many people seem to have a self image which is stuck in the view
of soul. Even thought they don't believe in the soul exactly, they see
themselves as their behavior more so than as their body. When people talk
about their mind, more often than not, they are talking about the patterns
of behavior of the brain, instead of talking about the brain directly. And
as such, they tend to associate themselves with that behavior, instead of
with their body.

If they could have that behavior duplicated in a machine, would they choose
to do it? Calling it uploading is really deceptive. It's not uploading as
if we were being _transfered_ to the machine. It's just building a machine
which is able to produce a close copy of our behavior and nothing more.
If, after seeing AIs do it all the time, humans should have a clear
understanding that duplicating the behavior doesn't allow _them_ to move
into the other body - it just allows the machine to mimic their behavior.

Allowing yourself to be copied, is what the option here is, not
transferring your soul into a machine. It might be neat to be able dump
the wiring of a brain, and archive it for all time - to allow anyone in the
future to run the brain emulator and talk to the person that was once alive
to learn what it was like "back in the day". That would be cool.

But will we as a society allow that emulated brain dump to continue to have
voting rights? To continue to consume resources and direct the allocation
of energy and raw material forever? I don't think we will. Most likely,
once we lose our DNA, we will just be put on the shelf and archived - like
a box of old photos and books about what did in life.

And what happens if we become so advanced that we can stop death? What
happens when we figure out how to keep humans alive (at least some part of
them like the brain) forever? What happens if through a slow process of
genetic engineering that we learn to extend life indefinitely? If this
happens, and if we don't manage to escape the earth into space and colonize
other planets (or build huge planet sized space stations from raw material
we find in space), we will have to regulate birth rates to prevent over
population. If people don't die, we can't let people reproduce. That will
be an odd battle. Do we prevent birth, or force people to be killed, or
take away their right to consume resources and allow them to live only as
long as someone younger who still have voting rights are willing to share
their resources with them? It's just so very different than what we have
do deal with now since we are powerless to keep people alive.

However humans and society ends up evolving, I believe the DNA will still
be in control - at least for a very long time.

It can't be taken out of control until some other system of survival by
reproduction comes along to replace it. Once we have smart enough AIs,
they will be able to build other AIs and DNA based life will have some
competition. But we have all of human society working against it
happening. I don't see why humans will ever want the machines to take over
or how we will ever allow it to happen. It's like fire, and viruses, and
bugs that threaten to destroy our food sources. We see it all as a serious
threat to humans and we kill them without a second thought. We will only
build, and use AI, to the extent that we can trust it won't take over.

It seems to me that the most likely danger might be from us sending AIs out
to explore space for us, and when they are far away and out of sight, they
end up evolving into a society of AIs which slowly over time, with the help
of natural selection, become self serving survival machines which form
their own society and in time, loose all connection with the original
purpose of helping humans survive. Then, and some distant time later, some
group of those AIs will return to Earth and try to take it away from us.
But that will be a hell of a fight because while they were surviving, we
will continue to build larger and more powerful society with lots of
advanced AI defense systems (to keep the "bad" AIs under control).

So even if the society of AIs evolved, why would they waste their time
fighting us for this little part of the universe when they can just as
easily spread out in the other direction and take over the rest of the
universe? It seems to me that if other AI reproducing life did evolove,
the DNA based life and the AI based life wouldn't end up having any big
battles until thee entire Universe was populated. We would instead just
have lots of small battles over the various distant out-posts we were
trying to get a foot-hold in. So we are talking millions if not billions
of years for that to happen just because of the size of the universe.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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